Volume 58 Issue 5 May 2008

Clive Gamble revisits the moment at which archaeologists realized that human prehistory was far longer than biblical scholars had imagined; and links this to today’s debates about the antiquity of the human mind with its capacity for self-aware thought.

David Abulafia, author of the newly published The Discovery of Mankind, considers Columbus’ first encounters with the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, and shows how, in the flesh, newly discovered peoples challenged European preconceptions about what it meant to be human.

Anthony Pagden describes how the conflict between Europe and Asia, which began over two millennia ago, hardened into an ideological, cultural and religious struggle between the West, which has always cast itself as free, and – despite frequent outbursts of religious fanaticism – secular, and an enslaved East governed not by the laws of man, but by the supposed laws of god.

Happenings were the in-thing in the 1960s, and the late 1960s – 1968 specifically – are the in-thing at the moment: so much so that the BBC is devoting a daily programme to the sounds of the year, a degree of attention that it has not accorded even to equally crowded turning-points such as 1945 or 1989.